One of the great things about the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival is the number of free performances that take place during the event. From Downtown Jazz on opening weekend to David Lam Park Jazz Weekend (June 30, July 1) and the Free Jazz Around Town series at five different venues, the festival has always made a big effort to get the music out there for everyone.

Anyone who would expect that the price reflects the players would be wrong. Case in point is the appearance of Polish tenor saxophonist Maciej Obara’s Quartet.

The group’s debut album, Unloved, was released on celebrated European label ECM last November and has garnered rave reviews. The leader is a monster player and the music he’s making with fellow Pole, Dominik Wania (piano) and Norwegian aces Ole Morten Vågan (double bass) and Gard Nilssen (drums) is exciting. Anyone who really gets to know the seven-track album will be hard pressed not to come away thinking that Obara may be the leader, but the session belongs to his pianist.

Obara chatted about the album, the band and the coming tour from his home in Warsaw.

Here are five things he noted about Unloved, and his second visit to Vancouver:

1. The band: “We’ve become a very different group over the past six years, with that really being reflected on the Unloved album. A lot of the material on the album comes from different periods in our time together and that we have been playing in our European shows, but there is a lot more improvisation and free playing around those melodies now in concert.”

2. The importance of Krzystof Komeda: Composer Komeda wrote Unloved for a soundtrack of a film of the same name by director Janusz Nasfeter. Obara has performed Komeda’s music in the band of legendary Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko: “From my perspective, if you are a young musician studying music in Poland, the music academies focus on American jazz. But we should also realize that there are jazz roots of our own in our composers’ work, which incorporate perhaps more melancholic Slavic elements of harmony in which it really makes it sound different. When I first joined Tomasz’s band and began playing the music of Komeda, I was really strongly influenced by it and I always love to present his music. It helped me find my voice.”

3. ECM: “The label has been so key to the development of the special sound that comes from the Scandinavian countries, Poland and so on. I sort of followed what Stanko did by playing with Norwegian musicians because it just seemed so natural. There has been a big influence of ECM recordings on jazz in our regions, but is it influential in North America? I don’t know.”

4. Trust and free expression: “Take a recording like our song Storyteller, which has very realized melodic ideas and then give it to these Norwegians who have really embraced this very free improvisation style for many years and you can hear it become something different each time it’s played. Having the trust in the band members to do that makes it very liberating for me as a composer.”

5. Dominik Wania: “He is one of the finest European jazz pianists working today. He received a classical education at the music conservatory in Krakow, and he always mentions how his harmonic freedom coming into improvisation is deeply informed and inspired by his experience with modern classical-music concepts. His favourite players are people like Craig Taborn and others who have these natural voices in this music, which may or may not be coming from what in the past was strictly called jazz. Hopefully, he’ll have his debut on ECM soon too.”

For a full listing of the free events at the jazz festival, check the program online at coastaljazz.ca.

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